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Usually, guns are used to make other people feel small and weak. Mortal. In an ingenious twist, however, Scale introduces (kinda) the opposite: a gun that can make things huge. Or teensy tiny. Or any size, really. That’s the central conceit of its semi-open-ended, Mario-64-inspired worlds, and there’s quite a lot to like in them so far. For instance, let’s say you’ve been swallowed up by a giant chompy rhino monster thing. Stuck in its acid-flooded maw, you’re probably doomed… unless! You enlarge the creature from within, turning its intestines into your own personal escape hatch water slide. Wheeeeeeee! Hello, freedo– oh no. Then you realize where you’ll be exiting from. Scale also has puzzles that aren’t totally gross, and they’re great too. Give its Kickstarter video a watch after the break.

Doesn’t that look excellent? And who cares about the odd spider baddie when you can overrun the world with GIANT BUTTERFLIES? And that’s just the tip of an iceberg that can fit in the palm of your hand or be the size of a galaxy. I’ve played Scale a bit, and one puzzle saw me go inside a house to retrieve a smaller house, take it outside, grow it to normal proportions, shrink the first house, and take it inside with me to place atop a pressure plate. Ouch, my perception of the nature of reality.

And while I haven’t gotten to play it, that bit at the end of the video does, in fact, feature an entire level that you can grow and shrink at will. Insane.

Scale’s set its Kickstarter funding goal at $87,000, which isn’t exactly chump change for a relatively unknown indie. Even at this early stage of development, however, it shows massive (or tiny, or mid-sized; whatever you want, really) potential. I’m definitely pulling for it, though I do worry that it’s off to a slightly slow start. What do you think, though? Do you plan on tossing a few coins into its cup?

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You play as young physics savant Penny Prince, inventor of a device which can suck the size out of one thing and shoot it into another. SCALE begins as Penny awakes in prison, convicted of 9,322,591 counts of Depraved Heart Murder for accidentally destroying the east coast. Someone has confiscated her cat. Against the express advice of the rehabilitative therapy coordinator now living inside her brain, she hastily reconstructs her device using materials from a nearby cellphone recycling bin and embarks upon escape in an attempt to regain her freedom and her cat.

This looks amazing.. I hope theres gonna be a proper narration and gameplay like for example the portal games not just yet another free form indie game where you are supposed to create all the content for yourself.

I saw a video of this guy presenting the game earlier this year and he was the least-enthused developer I’ve ever seen – it actually seemed like he hated the game. Which is perfectly natural when you work on one thing for eons, especially alone.

Looks interesting. I wonder if the one dynamic is enough to grow an entire game on? Pun, anyone?

Ah yeah, that video ha ha. So…that was a weird thing. I was feeling super sick and I had come into town to give this talk. But it was accidentally scheduled during another big event so I was literally talking to an audience of 3 people. If you want to see me actually talking about the game, check this interview I did with Adam Sessler: link to youtube.com

We had to do an aesthetic that allowed objects to look good at any size. If everything had textures, they would just get blurry when you scaled them up. So we just decided to put the detail in the geometry and concentrate on the lighting and shaders. Also the art is easier to produce which is good since it’s just me and Andrew doing the modeling :).

“Relatively unknown Indie”? Gasp! I’m not trying to show off my indie knowledge here, but Steve does pretty amazingly on the pedigree front… Literally wrote the book on game feel (” game feel” ISBN #589846-5566555114); was a fine, upstand former member of Flashbang; presented his erstwhile child Shadow Physics at the first Sense of Wonder talks in Japan. OH WOW BASICALLY I LOVE HIM FROM AFAR OKAY?